Ho man, i'm getting famous if people talk about my robot without me having to force it on them

I've been lurking around your forums for quite some time now and planned to post about it in the very near future. The thing is that until last week I was quite busy with the competition this robot has been made for (French qualifiers for Eurobot, followed by the Eurobot international finals, last week in Astrakhan, Russia).

The robot you can see on these videos is the second version of the project, and has been adapted to be able to compete to Eurobot 2011. The rules are restrictive in term of allowed robot perimeter, and some systems are strongly recommended, like having a platform on top of the robot for the opponent to put a beacon on. This strongly influenced the way it looks now.

It is composed of 14 AX-12+, with 5 AX-18F (one is actually a 18A, the same with a nicer body) for key articulations: the ones bearing most of the load. Add to each leg a small DC motor to power the wheel and a standard micro-servo to orient it.
The main brain is a Beagleboard-xM. It takes care of all the FK, IK, global motion control, sensor processing (from two cameras and a Neato LDS, the lidar from the Neato XV-11) and AI.
All the slave boards controlling the motor and small stuff like that are atmega328p boards (Pololu Baby Orangutan or Adruino Mini Pro) modified to communicate as dynamixel devices.

At our national qualifiers, in France, a month ago, we got the Creativity Award and the right to be among the 3 teams to represent our country at the international finals.
At the internal competition, we got the "Disign" award, and even though we did not score much points during matches, we still tried to make the show:

This is something i don't think any other team did, in any country, and it was the first time we showed it during an official match.

The project does not end here. I'm working on making it move satisfactorily well. Right now, the first thing to tackle are the latency problem I have when talking to the Dynamixels.
I think I will try two courses of action:
- try to use a soft-realtime linux kernel
- develop better code for my ATMega32u2-based USB to Dynamixel chip, transforming what is currently a dumb USB2DYNAMIXEL clone to a smarter dynamixel interface that knows about the Dynamixel protocol and can communicate efficiently with the 25 Dynamixel devices.

Ho man, i'm getting famous if people talk about my robot without me having to force it on them

I've been lurking around your forums for quite some time now and planned to post about it in the very near future. The thing is that until last week I was quite busy with the competition this robot has been made for (French qualifiers for Eurobot, followed by the Eurobot international finals, last week in Astrakhan, Russia).

The robot you can see on these videos is the second version of the project, and has been adapted to be able to compete to Eurobot 2011. The rules are restrictive in term of allowed robot perimeter, and some systems are strongly recommended, like having a platform on top of the robot for the opponent to put a beacon on. This strongly influenced the way it looks now.

It is composed of 14 AX-12+, with 5 AX-18F (one is actually a 18A, the same with a nicer body) for key articulations: the ones bearing most of the load. Add to each leg a small DC motor to power the wheel and a standard micro-servo to orient it.
The main brain is a Beagleboard-xM. It takes care of all the FK, IK, global motion control, sensor processing (from two cameras and a Neato LDS, the lidar from the Neato XV-11) and AI.
All the slave boards controlling the motor and small stuff like that are atmega328p boards (Pololu Baby Orangutan or Adruino Mini Pro) modified to communicate as dynamixel devices.

At our national qualifiers, in France, a month ago, we got the Creativity Award and the right to be among the 3 teams to represent our country at the international finals.
At the internal competition, we got the "Disign" award, and even though we did not score much points during matches, we still tried to make the show:

This is something i don't think any other team did, in any country, and it was the first time we showed it during an official match.

The project does not end here. I'm working on making it move satisfactorily well. Right now, the first thing to tackle are the latency problem I have when talking to the Dynamixels.
I think I will try two courses of action:
- try to use a soft-realtime linux kernel
- develop better code for my ATMega32u2-based USB to Dynamixel chip, transforming what is currently a dumb USB2DYNAMIXEL clone to a smarter dynamixel interface that knows about the Dynamixel protocol and can communicate efficiently with the 25 Dynamixel devices.